


voices in unison

by winchilsea



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Natsume Yuujinchou, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-19 13:56:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22745575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchilsea/pseuds/winchilsea
Summary: The guestbook has been with the inn for generations, and Yuuri is its latest keeper.(Natsume Yuujinchou AU.)
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Kudos: 23





	voices in unison

**Author's Note:**

> title from natsume yuujinchou's first opening theme

Yuuri locks himself in a bathroom stall, sticks a shakily drawn seal on the door, and puts his head between his knees. _No,_ he thinks. _Surely not._ He feels like he’s six years old all over again, stricken and betrayed, repeating, “You’re not human,” until the force of his own tears gagged him. 

His phone rings. It’s Mari-nee. Yuuri fumbles with the touch screen, sliding it unlocked the same moment he breathes in sharply to clear up his nose and voice. “Hello?”

“Yuuri,” Mari-nee says, preemptively apologetic.

“I don’t want to talk about my performance,” Yuuri says instantly, rubbing at his eyes under his glasses. _It was a mistake,_ he tells himself. _I made a mistake. It wasn’t him. It can’t be him. It was just—something that looked like him._

Silence. Mari-nee sighs, and Yuuri can so clearly picture her lighting a cigarette that it hurts. “That’s not why I called,” she says at last. “It’s the onsen. Five years is a long time, Yuuri.”

_I can’t go back. I have to go back._

“Did something happen?” Yuuri asks, fear slicing through him. He tightens his grip on his phone—no, it’s okay, they have Minako-sensei, and the wards, and neither of them are foolproof but it should be _enough_ , Yuuri wouldn’t have left otherwise.

“It’s been restless,” Mari-nee answers carefully. “Things being misplaced. Strange sounds. And”—the hesitation is clear in her voice—“a photo album of you was moved to the front entrance. I flipped through it, nothing’s missing, but I thought you’d want to know. Maybe you’d understand why.”

Yuuri closes his eyes. “What did Minako-sensei have to say?”

“Same as always,” Mari-nee says, meaning that Minako-sensei still won’t tell them anything because they’re not like Yuuri, and Minako-sensei hypocritically believes in drawing lines and keeping the boundaries clear. “She did say that it wouldn’t hurt if you came home.”

_I have to go back. I can’t go back._

“I am,” Yuuri insists. “I will.” He means it, he does, he just— “Soon,” he says. “I promise.”

“Do you _want_ to come home?”

His chest still feels ice cold from the hand that pressed down on it. “You can see me,” the thing wearing Viktor Nikiforov’s face said. “Who _are_ you?”

Yuuri takes a shaky breath, eyes tracing the gentle swirls of the seal now slightly curling on the door. “Yes,” he says, thinking of the familiar rhythms of the onsen. “Yes,” he says again. “After—my degree.” Because his career is over now, he can’t go on skating like this anymore, not when he made an embarrassment of himself at the Grand Prix Final, not when the goal he’d been working towards is defunct. 

There’s rustling over the line. “Are you okay?”

“Let me know if it escalates,” Yuuri says instead of answering. He hangs up. 

It sounds absurd, the kind of lie peddled by yokai with wide smiles and ill intentions: _Viktor Nikiforov is not human._

It hurts. It hurts more than any betrayal of its kind thus far.

*

There’s something bittersweet about the way Hasetsu looks now. A little shinier, like it’s finally letting the future drag forward, and a little lonelier. Moving forward always means leaving something behind. Five years is nothing to yokai, a blink of the eye, but for humans it’s different. Time passes quickly, and there’s never enough of it.

Minako greets him at the station, thankfully in her mortal form. She takes his suitcase, throws one arm over his shoulder, and says, “Such a fuss. You’d think you were gone five hundred years with how excited everyone got.”

_Everyone?_

“The middlings want to drink with you—you’re old enough now, right? So no more excuses about being underage. You’re in time for the flower-viewing too, but we’ll have to sneak you in or else you might get eaten. I’ve had to listen to yokai asking after Katsuki-sama day and night—”

“Minako-sensei,” Yuuri interrupts carefully. It’s always difficult to tell with her how much reverence he should be showing, so he plays it safe. “With all due respect, I’m not—I’ve moved on.”

“Hmm,” Minako-sensei says. Her fingers squeeze his arm painfully. “Is this you making a choice? Or is this you running away again?”

“That’s not fair,” he wants to say, but Minako-sensei would eat him alive if he actually says it out loud.

She relaxes her grip and doesn’t break her stride. “Well,” she begins, “you’re going to want to go home before you do anything rash.”

*

Home is Yu-topia, and when Yuuri touches the aged wood of the gate, he imagines he can feel it turn warm and hum under his hand. But it’s just wood, and Yu-topia is just a building. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t reach back into the past and touch his ancestors. He can’t ask questions, and the wood won’t offer any answers. The past is silent and so are ghosts.

There’s a chorus of _Katsuki-sama!_ the moment Yuuri steps past the threshold. Minako-sensei has already shed her mortal form, dragging the dozen layers of her kimono over the little yokai that run in circles around them. A few get caught in her feather-train, but Minako-sensei bobs on, unbothered by the weaker beings clinging to her.

Yuuri surreptitiously maneuvers his suitcase so that he doesn’t run any of them over. 

“Katsuki-sama!” The syllables are sharply emphasized, and Yuuri blinks, eyes focusing on the bovine yokai in front of him. “Are you ignoring me?”

That’s when Yuuri realizes that he _has_ been ignoring the yokai. Eyes sliding past them like they’re air, like he’s someone else, someone who can’t see them. Survival tricks he taught himself when he was young and then perfected when he moved to Detroit. 

“Sorry,” Yuuri says. “Just tired from the journey.” He doesn’t say _flight_ or _train ride_ because the concepts get fuzzy with yokai, who always blink and seem startled to be in the midst of modern technology, like they can’t fathom how such a thing could have happened so quickly under their noses.

“Hmph,” the bovine yokai says, clicking his hooves together before wandering off. He’s offended, but it won’t last long. It’s the only time the yokai remember that Yuuri is human—they let their grudges peter out instead of absentmindedly bearing it for centuries. 

Time. It always comes back to running out of time.

There are more yokai who welcome him home, and Yuuri makes sure to smile at them, no matter how much it feels like a grimace. Minako-sensei was right—they’ve worked themselves up into excitement, and there’s a crowd already drunk where normally there would be one, maybe two, yokai at a time soaking in the onsen. It’s a good thing no one else can see the rowdy scene they’re making. 

Minako-sensei makes him go through the front entrance of Yu-topia—“It’s a homecoming,” she hisses, digging her sharp fingers into his back as she shoves him through the doorway—and Yuuri fidgets in lobby, feeling more and more like a stranger.

“I’m home,” he calls, voice wavering only a little. 

The sight of his mother rushing to greet him unknots some of the anxiety in Yuuri, but at the same time causes the strange feeling telling him he’s out of place to redouble. “Yuuri!” She envelopes him in a hug, and she smells just the same as she did five years ago, and how absurd is it to feel homesick _now_? “Welcome home!”

Katsuki Hiroko might be the living embodiment of destiny, to have married into this family of all families, and to have given birth to a son like Yuuri.

His mother tries to take his luggage, but Yuuri protests. They end up in the dining room somehow, Yuuri’s luggage left behind the counter in the lobby. He struggles to keep up with his mother’s commentary about the changes made to Yu-topia, the new fryers, the retiled bathhouse, a new brand of sake on the menu, and, “We have a new mascot!” 

She puts a hand to her face, smiling fondly.

“A new mascot?” Yuuri looks up from the plate of dumplings that seems to have magicked its way onto the table. His father, sliding a small dish of soy sauce next to it, gives him a wink. 

“Mari’s taken him out for a walk, but they should be back any minute! You’ll adore him, Yuuri,” his mother assures him, buoyant in her happiness.

Minako-sensei barks, a dry wrung-out sound pulled out of her long throat, and it startles Yuuri into dropping the dumpling back onto the plate.

“Oh?” His mother glances at the space beside him—it’s wrong, Minako-sensei isn’t sitting on that side. “Is Minako-chan here? I’ll go get her favorite sake.”

Even though Minako-sensei clicks her teeth, she still tracks his mother’s progress as she gets up to disappear into the kitchen. Yuuri looks away. He is his mother’s son in many ways, but he hopes never in this aching, lonely thing, in this burned-bridge longing.

Yuuri wonders which is harder: leaving or being left behind?

“By the way,” Minako-sensei begins, leaning more of her weight onto him, “I wasn’t sure earlier, but you’ve gotten fat, haven’t you?” Her fingers pinch his cheek. “Even though you left Japan to focus on your skating, don’t tell me you became complacent and wasted the effort I put into training you.”

It all happens at once: Yuuri falling over, his mother returning with a tray of sake, Mari-nee coming home with a chime of metal, and then, suddenly, a ball of fur accosting Yuuri, climbing, and falling, and climbing, and falling again. 

Yuuri sits up, bemused by the dog jumping into his lap, snuffling at his shirt. 

“He’s cute, right?” His mother asks, beaming. 

Real, then. 

“What’s his name?” Yuuri asks. Minako-sensei is drinking sake straight from the bottle, distance put between her and the table now that his mother has returned.

“Wanko-chan,” his mother says.

“Ponta,” his father says.

“Vicchan,” Mari-nee says, sitting down with a bored look. “Get it? Viktor. Vicchan. After that skater you love.”

They don’t know. Yuuri hasn’t told anyone about what happened in Sochi—not even Phichit, who watched him slowly peel his posters off their dorm room walls and roll them all up. “He didn’t know who I was,” Yuuri said. It was all he would—could—say. Yuuri hasn’t told anyone, and he never will. 

So Yuuri clears his throat and says, “You adopted a dog?” The dog looks up at Yuuri with big, blue eyes. He has silver curls, just a few shades off from white. 

“More like he adopted us,” Mari-nee answers, one elbow on the table. “Found him outside one morning, and he hasn’t left since.”

“You found him,” Yuuri repeats. He pushes the dog away, suddenly wary. The dog’s ears and tails droop, and Mari-nee reaches out to scratch him behind the ears while rolling her eyes.

“He was inside the wards, Yuuri. Besides, if he were a yokai, Minako would have said something.”

“Oh, he’s definitely a yokai,” Minako-sensei says, snickering.

“Minako-sensei!” Yuuri exclaims, standing up. “How could you have let him in?”

“Oi, brat. Watch your tone.”

“It’s fine, Yuuri,” Mari-nee says, frowning at him like he’s overreacting. “He’s harmless, he’s been here for months.”

“You don’t know that,” Yuuri snaps. They’re all staring at him. His mother, his father. Mari-nee, with one unimpressed eyebrow raised. Minako-sensei, her long neck craned up. The paper mask over her eyes shrouds her expression, which only serves to make her stare the worst out of all of them. 

That silent judgement, a faceless crowd in the dark. Don’t—the shadow of his past hangs over him, the betrayal, and the paranoia, and the mistrust, and his classmates edging their seats away from him as they called him strange and creepy—look at me like that. 

The forest. The mountain. The well. Yuuri has good reasons for the ice-spike that rises in him, for the way he casts his eyes away from the people he should trust most, for the way he clenches his hands into fists and squeezes his eyes shut.

The dog puts his paw on Yuuri’s foot. “Yuuri,” he says, the low voice incongruous with his small form, “I’m sorry.” Two syllables of clumsy Japanese.

Mari’s elbow slips off the table. “It talked.” 

“Don’t be angry, Yuuri,” the dog says now in English. “I wanted to see you, so I waited here.”

Yuuri swallows, reluctantly looking down at the dog. “Do you want your name back?” Because that’s something Yuuri can handle. He’s familiar with the way this works: the guestbook has thinned over the years as fewer yokai venture from the mountains into the city, and they all ask for their name before they retreat forever. 

A plume of smoke, and then Yuuri once again finds himself toppling over onto the tatami—this time there’s someone on top of him. Viktor Nikiforov. 

The last time Yuuri saw Viktor Nikiforov, he punched him in the face before walking away. 

“Of course not!” Viktor Nikiforov is saying now, giving Yuuri a look that’s much more offended than the look he gave Yuuri after receiving that right hook. He lays his head on Yuuri’s chest. 

Fight or flight. The choice is obvious. Yuuri quickly and neatly extricates himself from Viktor Nikiforov’s hold and absconds to his room in a matter of seconds. 

The benefit of the escape is lessened when he sees the dozens of posters on his bedroom walls staring back at him.

There’s a knock on the door. “Are you going to sleep, Yuuri? Let’s sleep together!”

“No!” Yuuri shouts, pressing his weight against the door. After a few minutes pass without any resistance from Viktor, Yuuri marches over to his walls with the intent to tear down his posters.

But just as he means to rip one off, he falters. It seems like such a waste to be so careless after how much money and time was spent in acquiring them, not only by him but by his family and friends. Minako-sensei would tell him not be so callously ungrateful, so Yuuri carefully peels them off his walls one by one. 

Late at night, Yuuri wakes, a dream slipping out of him too quietly for him to hold onto it, leaving him with only an impression of cold. There’s something at his door—an animal? He can hear it sniffing curiously through the crack at the bottom.

His window is silent. No yokai have come knocking in the night, and Yuuri sits up slowly, touching the curtains. He almost expects them to billow open, for a yokai to politely perch on the windowsill and ask for an audience with Katsuki-sama. It’s been five years for him, almost a fifth of the time he has spent on this earth. For them it’s been—an intake of breath, or an idle moment lost to contemplating a flower by the roadside. 

Yuuri hugs his legs, listening to the what once was the familiar sounds of the hot springs. It’s so still. He wonders if this will be what it’s like forever.

*

The next few days are tense. Viktor continues the charade of being a dog, but now whenever Yuuri’s mother feeds him, Viktor compliments the food. Enthusiastically. He provides idle commentary on the dramas playing in the dining room if none of the guests are around—if they are, he allows himself to be pet. Yuuri only ever sees him in brief glimpses, and he never attempts to make eye contact or conversation. After a few of Viktor’s attempts to engage Yuuri are neatly brushed off, he stops trying to approach Yuuri, docile in his 

It’s incongruous with the encompassing presence Yuuri felt in Sochi—a fine mist, a cold draft, in comparison to the blizzard that froze him out all those months ago.

Yuuri stays in his room as much as he can for half a week, turning off his phone to avoid getting news alerts and questions about his possible retirement. He spends that time unpacking, going through his old things, re-familiarizing himself with his own bedroom. A notebook, half-filled with class notes, half-filled with scribbles of yokai that he saw when looking out the window. A pack of paper used for seals, a string of cut-outs from when he tried to learn how to use familiars. Notes written on a map bought at a corner convenience store, some of the symbols foreign to him after five years apart.

There’s a whole life that got cleaved from him when he left here in the dust of his belongings.

One day, Yuuri wakes pre-dawn, disoriented by coming out of a white landscape to a blanketing darkness. He feels a compulsion, an urge to move, so he gets out of bed. In just a few days, the memory of Yu-topia has once more re-conjured itself, even the differences now overlaying the familiar, forgotten grooves. It doesn’t feel as much like a stranger anymore, but Yuuri wonders if he’ll ever really know its dusty corners again.

Yuuri stares at the wall as he ties his shoes at the side entrance. It’s blank, save for some stains that show its age. He can’t remember what used to be there before even though he must have looked at it every day on his way out the door. _Maybe it got erased_ , he consoles himself. _Maybe it was never really there at all._

Behind him, Yuuri hears the skittering of nails on wood. It’s Viktor. Yuuri doesn’t acknowledge him, just stands up and zips his jacket. He taps the tip of his shoes against the floor and then sets off.

The sun has already begun its ascent, the mirror-mirage semicircle of it hanging above the sea, clinging to the horizon line. He doesn’t have to look behind him to know that Viktor is following, still a dog.

Aside from a few startled glances from the fishermen already at the pier trying their lines, no one outwardly gives any signs of recognizing Yuuri. By the time Yuuri reaches Nanatsuji, the morning light has turned a bleached blue. An old lady with shrewd eyes sells him two red bean buns and obligingly fills his water bottle with barley tea. Nawano-san. Her children had already rebelled against taking over the shop when Yuuri was in high school—they’ve all moved to different prefectures now, she tells him. Now she has an apprentice who will inherit it after she’s gone.

“Welcome back,” she says as he’s on his way out, almost an afterthought. 

Yuuri says, “Thank you,” and doesn’t feel any different.

**Author's Note:**

> uploading some old works because i deleted my entire tumblr. catch me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/mountliang) or on the barren landscape of my remade [tumblr](http://winchilsea.tumblr.com)
> 
> the big secret of this story was that yuuri's ability to see yokai has been diminishing, and ultimately was meant to be about growth, comfort, and letting things go without tearing off your own arm.
> 
> *
> 
> “I didn’t think you were such a coward,” Minako-sensei says. 
> 
> Yuuri looks away. 
> 
> “Going to Detroit to train was one thing, but to think that you left because you were afraid of—” she reels back, a blur of rich colors and white feathers “—what were you even afraid of? Saying goodbye?”
> 
> “I wanted a clean break!” Yuuri says. “I couldn’t—this is exactly what I didn’t want.” The slow loss, the agonizing erosion. 
> 
> “What did you think was going to happen when you came back blind?” Minako-sensei asks. “Were you going to abandon everyone waiting for you?”
> 
> There will be someone else to come along and take the guestbook. There always is. That’s the cycle of it, the predetermined wheel of the onsen and whatever force binds it to the land. 
> 
> “It would have been worse to wake up one day and have everything be silent,” Yuuri says. “I didn’t want to mourn. Grieve. Despair.” I didn’t want to be like my mother, Yuuri doesn’t say, but Minako-sensei is shrewd.
> 
> “You mean you didn’t want to be like Hiroko,” she says.
> 
> “Have you ever talked to her?” Yuuri points out, accusatory. “Even once since the day she lost her ability to see yokai? I didn’t want to be stuck forever like that, always caught with one foot in this world even though it abandoned me. That’s why I went to Detroit. That’s why I never came home.”
> 
> “You wanted to leave us all behind.”


End file.
